It was a great morning on the beach. Sunrise cast a pink glow on the horizon and the diffuse light began to softly lighten up the tidepools as the Pacific Ocean retreated from the beach. I stepped out of my tent, stretched reached back into the tent for my camera, grabbed the tripod and happily skipped to the tidepools.
Ok, maybe not skipped, but I felt like skipping. It was that kind of a morning.
I spent time photographing sea stars with water swirling around them. I had tried this the night before and thought I might have a good image or two but I wanted to keep working with the slow shutter speeds, sea foam and sea stars With polarizer on my lens to cut down on any glare and to help lengthen my shutter speed, I went from sea star to tide pool to sea star adjusting the polarizer when needed.
Then it happened, I plopped the tripod and camera into a new position and heard a kerplunk. Looking down into the waves rushing back down the beach, I saw my polarizer dancing in the waters as it went happily out to sea.
F***! I watched in disbelief as my filter disappeared into the surf. I looked at the sea anenomes I was wanting to photograph, picked up my camera & tripod and sullenly trudged back up the beach listing in my head my equipment malfunctions over the past year - broken lens, camera held together with pink duct tape, broken tripod, broken filter, make that 2 broken filters and now a filter lost to the sea. What was wrong with me that I keep breaking my equipment?
I sat on a drift log to eat breakfast ruminating about my bad luck and thought of all the photographers the night before with their pretty cameras, tripods that weren't borrowed, fancy lenses and a supply of fresh filters. Then I looked at my poor little camera, covered in pink duct tape sitting lamely on the tripod I had borrowed from my boss, filterless lens pointed out to the sea. I suck!
The shadows from the trees behind me shortened, lighting more of the beach. I looked up the beach to the rocks and the patterns made by the armies of barnacles. Cool patterns. I need some texture images. And heck, I can still make damn nice images with my duct taped camera.
That's a minor issue - my equipment still works, I just need to work with what I got and this is what I got right now. At least my creativity didn't get swept out to sea. Now that would be a major problem.
So I grabbed the camera off the tripod and walked up the beach to see what I could see. I finally did go back to the site of the filter incident and photographed the sea anemone with crab legs sticking out of it that had originally attracted me to that spot.
The above image? That is the sea star at twilight I had made the previous night . . . with a filter.
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